21. Cold Water and a run in the fresh air before breakfast.
Lydia Maria Child, The American Frugal Housewife (1833)
Last week:
This week is a little different — I am not writing about a book I regularly lecture on. I am moving, and my books are in absurd piles under the stairs (including, I hope, The Awakening, which I had planned to write about this week). At the top of one of these piles, I uncovered a volume, whose full title is: THE AMERICAN FRUGAL HOUSEWIFE. DEDICATED TO THOSE WHO ARE NOT ASHAMED OF ECONOMY (available at the link by project Gutenberg)
When she published this book in 1828, after her first year as a housewife, Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880) was known as a writer of short stories, novels, and essays. Now, she is best known for her reform work in abolition, women’s rights, and Native rights. As the story goes, she wrote her novel Hobomok in 6 weeks (about interracial marriage), made a good amount of money from it for an unmarried woman of 22 to live off of, so she kept writing and married late. She started a children’s magazine, and would be the editor of several anti-slavery publications. This book The American Frugal Housewife was her most lucrative work, and it would go on to see 33 editions.
The same year she published the edition I have, Child published a book arguing for immediate emancipation for all enslaved people, An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans. The criticism on this early piece of abolitionist writing is vast, so I will have to save it for another day, but I think it is worth knowing about this context for her work. Because I knew her first as an abolitionist, I approached this book of household tips as written by an activist and reformer, which made it more appealing to me. In the nineteenth century the reverse was true: her fame as a woman writer from the children’s magazines and novels is what introduced her antislavery treatise into many American homes.
I inherited this little volume from my grandmother, Ruth Liuzza, who passed last July. Her son, my uncle Roy had gifted it to her in the early 80s, which she made note of in the flyleaf. We had many books in common, so I know she usually would write the page number of interesting or relevant citations on the flyleaf, but she hasn’t here. I don’t know if she found it interesting, but it since it made through the many, many cullings of her library through the years, I figured I should give it a try.
I never got to be a housewife, and if I'm being honest, I’m not particularly frugal. But have been broke, so I do know how to be frugal in a pinch, and I am setting up housekeeping in a new house, so I thought Mrs. Child might have something new to teach me.
As I read, I kept thinking that it would be a useful book for Dana from Kindred, Octavia Butler’s novel about time travel and slavery, or the people in Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel, a novel that imagines a post-pandemic society. In other words, this would be a useful book if I was stranded in 1833, and had to make soap. The language is familiar, but unfamiliar too. I know of lime, but not unslaked lime. I know of pancakes but not dissolved pearlash. Here’s a recipe we probably all would know, for comparison:
Pancakes should be made of half a pint of milk, three great spoonfuls of sugar, one or two eggs, a tea-spoonful of dissolved pearlash, spiced with cinnamon, or cloves, a little salt, rose-water, or lemon-brandy, just as you happen to have it. Flour should be stirred in till the spoon moves round with difficulty. If they are thin, they are apt to soak fat. Have the fat in your skillet boiling hot, and drop them in with a spoon. Let them cook till thoroughly brown. The fat which is left is good to shorten other cakes. The more fat they are cooked in, the less they soak.
If you have no eggs, or wish to save them, use the above ingredients, and supply the place of eggs by two or three spoonfuls of lively emptings; but in this case they must be made five or six hours before they are cooked,—and in winter they should stand all night. A spoonful or more of N.E. rum makes pancakes light. Flip makes very nice pancakes. In this case, nothing is done but to sweeten your mug of beer with molasses; put in one glass of N.E. rum; heat it till it foams, by putting in a hot poker; and stir it up with flour as thick as other pancakes.
See what I mean? It’s just the far side of legible. Possibly my sisters Katie or Quinn could help me make good sense of it, but I am not on their level of culinary understanding. I think half the artists and crafty women I know would find the section on “Cheap Dye-stuffs” fascinating, FYI.
Before and after the recipes are a few chapters of advice. The whole book is written in the imperative. The sections read like wooden signs.
Rise early. Eat simple food. Take plenty of exercise. Never fear a little fatigue. Let not children be dressed in tight clothes; it is necessary their limbs and muscles should have full play, if you wish for either health or beauty.
There are sections on what to do if you are poor, and what to do if you are well-off but wish to avoid extravagance, and how to educate daughters. These parts are dated, and read like our poem by Jamaica Kincaid, “Girl.”
Skip those parts, or read them for anthropological purposes. But the advice in the first two chapters read like Sustainability 101. She begins the book:
The true economy of housekeeping is simply the art of gathering up all the fragments, so that nothing be lost. I mean fragments of time, as well as materials. Nothing should be thrown away so long as it is possible to make any use of it, however trifling that use may be; and whatever be the size of a family, every member should be employed either in earning or saving money.
And her next 8 pages show you how. These pages feel like our future, not our past, if I’m being honest. Lauren Olamina from Parable of the Sower would have kept this book in her rucksack; survivalists should too.
I am reflecting today on why I chose this book to read in the mornings after moving into my new place. With much to do, I am sitting in a rocking chair, reading about darning and mending and weaving and dyeing. I moved across town, not into 1833. But yes, it was a kind of time travel. This useful information, spoken directly from one home to another, from one woman to another, in the shortest possible imperatives, felt like an outstretched hand. My grandmother’s hand. And while I usually read to enter an imaginary world; this book took me into an embodied world of work and chores, familiar and different at once. How she did these chores then and how I do them now is different, of course — but the chores did not change. The work of making due continues.
Careful readers will see that I, ahem, have removed the game plan from the top of the post. This is because my semester has ended and I am not lecturing again until September. Previously, my posts followed my syllabi — now that there is no syllabus, I will grasp that little liberty and write about whatever I want for the next three months.